So, Muxtape (as we knew it) is no more.
“Giving up any kind of editorial or creative control was something I had a much harder time swallowing…
And so I made one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever faced: I walked away from the licensing deals.”
This is such a shame. Muxtape was great. It was such a cool-old-new-simple way of discovering music. One of the reasons I loved it was that the whole experience was natural and organic. There were no “if you like this then try this” automated recommendations. There were no band biographies. There was no rating system.
It was about listening to songs that somebody thought worked well together. Or suited a particular occasion. Or just wanted you to hear. And on the flip side, it was about making your own mixtape. Deciding which song should follow the last. It encouraged you to think about the tape as a whole as well as each individual track.
(Don’t get me wrong, I love and use automated recommendations like Last.fm, iTunes Genius etc. But Muxtape was different and it was nice to have both methods.)
Muxtape will now be “relaunching as a service exclusively for bands”, which sounds like Myspace but (I’ve no doubt) will be much better. Justin Ouellette (the creator of Muxtape) did such an amazing job with the simplicity and usability of Muxtape, I can only presume this next iteration will be just as good. Even though I’ll miss what Muxtape once was, I look forward to seeing what it will become.
Had Muxtape continued as it was, I think it could have taken the music industry in a interesting direction - the popularity of music within the community was determined by the people listening & sharing, not by marketing. Hopefuly, one day, the major labels will realise their mistake and sing this to Justin:
Posted on 27th September 2008 at 8:12 am